ReadWriteWeb

Two months ago we reviewed a neat Adobe AIR app directory called FreshAirapps. FreshAIRapps looked to be the premier destination for debuting Adobe AIR applications. Two months later and the creator, James Whittaker, is under fire by the very company he's freely promoted.

Sending private messages through back channels is nothing new. We do it all the time with emails and direct messages on multiple services. However, sometimes information is just too sensitive to keep around once it's been sent. Wouldn't it be great to have messages self-destruct after being read, Harry Potter style? Well Privnote is just the service for you.

Sisense, a company that specializes in intelligence software, has launched in private beta an analytic dashboard for the Amazon S3 platform. Normally, developers would have to go through a ton of logs that Amazon provides to make sense of data. Sisense aims to be the Google Analytics for Amazon S3 with it's Prism dashboard by providing developers with a more visual interface. Best of all, it's free.

There's a new aggregator in town folks. If you're a fan of Dave Winer's political NewsJunk aggregation site, Techmeme, or FriendFeed, then you're going to love Winer's counterpart to the political NewsJunk site, Tech NewsJunk. Created because Winer wasn't getting enough news about products, Tech Newsjunk is the latest product review aggregator to hit the market.

It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we looked at Adobe's announcement of searchable Flash, checked in with online TV service Hulu, reviewed a couple of innovative new web apps (Gnip and Identi.ca) and reviewed Firefox's recent world record. On the trends side, we analyzed Microsoft's acquisition of semantic search company Powerset, looked into the latest Yahoo stats, asked if email is in danger, and reported on a new Mobile Web standards initiative.

The Iranian parliament is set to debate a draft bill that would add a number of crimes to the list of those that can result in execution, among them "establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy." Apostasy means the abandonment of a religion. The official Iranian news agency reports that the bill is intended to "toughen punishment for harming mental security in society."

While Twitter might be going through a rather rough time right now, a lot of developers are still banking on its success. There are already a lot of desktop clients available for Twitter, but besides some cosmetic differences, most of them look and act very much the same. TweetDeck, which released a new beta today, takes a refreshingly different approach by not only integrating support for search through Summize, but also by adding groups and by displaying more than one column at a time.

As Twitter began to fail on a regular basis, many of its users turned to other micro-blogging services to continue on with their 140-character lifestyle. Some returned to Jaiku or Pownce, others starting plurking, and just recently, an open source Twitter clone launched called identi.ca which has people "denting" (Yes, really - it won the vote). And then there are the true social media addicts who joined each one of these services as they launched. For these folks, maintaining a presence in all the communities can be difficult, which is why finding a universal status updating service can help.

Google's Street View launched in the US last May, but expanding the service to Europe is proving to be a bit more difficult for Google. The Google Maps blog today announced the release of Street View for the route of the Tour de France, but privacy activists in England are anything but amused by the prospect of Google starting to photograph the streets of London.

Polymeme is a new memetracker that bills itself as "a polymath's guide to news." Polymeme is the brainchild of Evgeny Morozov who started the project because of his frustration with most current memetrackers and the echo chamber effect often associated with them. Polymeme is based on Drupal and uses Reuter's OpenCalais to tag and index the 25,000 blogs it tracks.